The Wonderful World Of Coding

In today’s blog I am going to talk about coding, which I am so excited about. At Western Washington University I am double majoring in Marketing and Management Information Systems. I personally love the MIS major because I am given the chance to learn the ins and outs of information systems.  In the higher-level classes I am learning the basics of coding and it has been so much fun. Currently I am learning Visual Basic. It is very hard and complicated but after I finally get a program to work I feel so accomplished.  I just wish I had the time and money to learn all the different types of computer languages. There is a solution to my problem and it is called Codecademy: http://www.codecademy.com/

This is a FREE resource, where you can learn all of the different computer languages. You can learn it on your own time and it is so user-friendly. It also doesn’t take very long to work your way through the different lessons. They give you step by step directions on each line of code. In less than a half an hour I was able to code my name into bubbles as you can see below:

On the actual website I was able to make the bubbles move around whenever I put my mouse over my name. The fact that I didn’t even spend 30 minutes and was able to do that is so cool to me. Coding is not as hard as everyone thinks. I then moved to learning how to write code for a website. This took me a bit longer to do but  that was because I wanted it to represent me and honestly I got lost in all the fun I was having.

The last thing that I learned how to do in this two hour time span was  create the sun and the earth. The earth rotates around the sun. That was a little bit more complicated but what is so great about Codecademy is there wasn’t a moment where I felt  totally lost.

By the end of spending two hours on this site I had done all three tutorials and had begun learning HTML and CSS. Granted I have a bit of a background in coding,  but it is not as much as anyone else. Yet I was able to accomplish all of this in such a short time. Honestly if I can do it you can do it.  If you haven’t checked it out I really suggest you do, at least to just get the feel of what coding is about.

Now why does this matter to people in the marketing field?

This should not be an area that marketers ignore. You should not be in the dark about what the IT people are doing.  I think the biggest mistake of a marketer is having no idea how the sites you advertise on are created. Now I am not saying that a marketer should be able to code a crazy complicated program but you should at least be comfortable with technology.  Being comfortable with the technology is going to make you more confident and maybe step out of your comfort zone when it comes to working with the website or trying out new ideas.  Another great reason to be comfortable with the coding language is you will actually be able to talk to  and understand the IT people.

Gone are the days where you give the IT people a brief description of what you want and they get frustrated because you don’t understand the limitations and possibilities of what they can do. Now you can learn exactly what can be done and the challenges that IT people have to deal with. Your going to understand them better and that creates more of a consensus.

Really in the end everything you do is programming. Planning what to advertise and when to advertise and where to advertise is programming. You have to decide the process you are going to take and where everything is going to be.  You just don’t see it as programming because you were not taught to see it that way.  By understanding programming I think that you will learn to look even more analytically at all of your processes.

Learning to code is so much fun and it is so rewarding.  I don’t know about you but the feeling that the meme below represents is a pretty great one and if coding makes you feel this way then why wouldn’t you want to learn?

Why marketers should learn how to program

Paid Media: It Has Not Died Out

If you have been following my blog you will notice my posts lately have talking about utilizing owned and earned media. These types of media are essential to the success of your business but you should not stop there.  As a business you should still be utilizing paid media.  As you can see in the above image, by utilizing earned, owned, AND paid media you will create a comprehensive marketing strategy.

Paid media directs traffic to your owned media and promotes the content in order to gain generated earned media.  What is great about paid media is that it guarantees immediacy, has control and scale.  Granted you have to spend money but the amount you spend, if done right, will be nothing compared to how much you will make. Since social media is so popular it has given businesses another chance to promote or sponsor their ads on sites, like Facebook and Twitter. HubSpot, below, is a good example of paid media.

An interesting form of paid media that is extremely beneficial is Native Advertising, which the HubSpot ad above is one of.  This is where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience,  in which it is posted. The goal is to not disrupt the user experience. The advertisers want to offer information that is helpful and similar to the other information on the site, so that the content is engaged and has a higher rate. Currently 62% of publishers and media companies offer some kind of native advertising program and the most popular forms of native advertising are sponsored blogs, sponsored articles and Facebook sponsored updates.

Cracked is a great example of  what good native advertising looks like. Brands work directly with  Cracked to create sponsored content. Currently fifth on the Native Advertising Leader board (http://nativeadvertising.com/#/leaderboard) is their story 5 Real-Life Stories of Twins Creepier Than Any Horror Movie. As you can see Cracked is known for writing funny and engaging material that is written in the same tone as a non-sponsored article.

Forbes is also doing very well in the native advertising land. They have decided to name their native advertising product  BrandVoice.  They do not want it to represent an ad but  leadership. To be authentic is their goal. They want to “foster an environment in which journalists, marketers, and audience could exchange ideas with one another.” Below is a graph representing the growing numbers that Forbes has had in their partners, posts, and page views since joining with SAP and creating their native advertising program.

As you can see Forbes’s digital partnership has been growing and still will be. Like I have been saying content is everything and that is what drives native advertising. Also being transparent is a key player in being successful.  Since native advertising is a form of paid advertising this strengthens my point that paid media is not dead. Paid media is evolving and journalists should make sure to do the same. You should not cross paid or native advertising  out of your marketing strategy and if you haven’t yet started native advertising you should do it now.

Moving on to my last topic of paid media, a quickly growing sector,  is programmatic ad buying. Programmatic ad buying is as simple as it sounds. Businesses buy ads, like you would buy products on Amazon.  This type of buying is of action form and is in real-time.

The only difference is the computer does all the work for you. It is like when you do your taxes on Turbo Tax, a few clicks and your ads are bought and you can go on your merry way.   What is great is that the advertisers buy ads individually so that a consumer is presented an ad tailored specifically to them.  You are enriching the consumer experience with tailored content and it is way easier than the traditional ways of buying ads because it is so quick and easy. You don’t have to buy ads that are tailored to a large segment of individuals with the hopes that some of them will respond and react.

This software does the work that humans just can’t do. This may sound scary because it seems that once again computers and software are replacing the jobs for humans, but that isn’t the case.  Computers can’t run all by themselves. The media buyers will still have jobs but instead of making calls between the buyer and seller they will be analyzing data on a computer screen. This will require that people learn more skills and I know that change is hard but it is essential. People need to be willing to change and learn new tricks. Programmatic ad buying is going to make their jobs easier, once they learn all the skills.

Not only is programmatic ad buying thriving on in the internet but it is moving to television.  This is going to help advertisers avoid the issues of the DVR. Soon ads will be so targeted to the viewers that they won’t want to change the channel.  There are still many bugs that need to be fixed before this becomes reality. Also the ad buying will most likely not be real-time, like it is now, but it will be way quicker.  I’m excited to see how this all turns out.

Below are some links that provide more information on the topics I discussed in today’s blog.

http://www.sharethrough.com/nativeadvertising/

http://www.cracked.com/article_20355_5-real-life-stories-twins-creepier-than-any-horror-movie.html

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140107180859-5853751-the-ultimate-guide-to-native-advertising

http://www.forbes.com/sites/lewisdvorkin/2013/12/02/inside-forbes-some-data-and-tips-about-native-advertising-the-ftc-might-find-interesting/

Google+ and Twitter Chats Oh My!

There are two very important items on the agenda for my blog today: Google+ and Twitter chats. I will first begin discussing Google+.

The above meme depicts the feelings of most people I know. I was invited into Google+ in my senior year of high school. No one my age was on the social network and so I never took the time to learn more about it. It wasn’t until the end of my junior year in college that I  re-looked at my Google +. There were more friends of mine on the site but I still saw nothing new. Maybe it is the fear of joining a new network or maybe it is the fact that no one in my social circle is participating in Google+ but I still am not convinced it has much of a future.

From what I can tell and what others  have mentioned is that Google+ has mimicked Facebook, to some extent. They both allow for you to update status’ and the ability to like other people’s posts. You can upload photos and links to other sites. Google+ does have the feature of circles, which allows you to group your friends by your interests but Facebook also gives this ability. You can create groups, pages, and have people with similar interests join on Facebook. The one feature that I feel Google+ has the upper hand in is their Hangout feature.  It is like Skype, where you can video chat with others, but more people can be involved in the Hangout. Also you can share documents and work on them while you are chatting. This is especially handy during meetings. Facebook just happens to have this feature as well but I think Google+ wins this one because you can’t share documents on Facebook.  On top of all of this you can also video chat on your phone through the free Google Hangout app. This is so great when you are in the car or on the go, but have to be in a meeting.

Many would say that a benefit of Google+ is it that you can easily share content across all Google products. Yes, it is great that all these tools are managed in one place but sometimes there is too much of a good thing. I love that I can log into my Google account and have everything at my fingertips but I don’t see how Google+ has benefited it. I would say the main reason I still keep my Google+ is that Google runs everything.  You want to be loved by Google and at school all I ever hear is you want to be searchable.

Google has created their own SEO ranking signal, Google Authorship.  The better and more content that you post the higher you will get in the ranks.   Though I am not a fan of Google+ and am unconvinced by the articles that spout the benefits of it, I will not be getting rid of it any time soon.  I want to be searchable and I want Google to love me and if that means posting and attempting to interact in a copy cat of a social network than so be it.

Now moving on to the next topic of this post: Twitter chats. Today I had the experience of being involved in a Twitter chat. Before I started I was very confused. First, I had no idea what a Twitter chat was and second I had no idea how to get involved.  My digital marketing professor was very kind to give us the link to a list of scheduled chats: http://tweetreports.com/twitter-chat-schedule/. Here you can find all different types of chats that are  going on throughout the week on all sorts of topics. I thought this was incredibly cool because there were so many topics that I was interested in. I found this chat called #BizForum. This was supposed to be a weekly chat with business professionals about trending marketing topics.  To enter a chat you just have to add the hashtag to your comment and you can see all of the  other people commenting. Sadly when I entered this chat it was dead. There was only one other person in the chat room, who just happened to be another digital marketing student from Vermont.

Though I didn’t get the chance to really take part and experience a Twitter chat I am not going to stop trying. I think these chats are great experience and great networking. You get the chance to speak with business professionals without that awkward face-to-face situation. Also while in the chats you can look up the people you are speaking to and get to know more about them, and vice versa.  These are great for businesses as well because they can talk to their customers and build authority at the same time.  You also get to stay informed about what the customers are saying about your company and your brand. This is beneficial because people feel more comfortable saying their feelings behind the computer screen and they feel like you are really hearing them and really care.  This is just another great and fun way to grow your brand, authority, and popularity.

More ways Google+ is mimicking Facebook: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/04/google-redesign-further-mimics-facebook/

Want to learn how to get involved with Twitter chats and the benefits they have for your company? Click below!

How to Participate in a Tweet Chat

5 Ways Twitter Chats Can Help Your Business

Tools And Etiquette For Using Social Media Effectively

Social media is not just for  tweeting your thought of the day or updating your status about the “amazing” lunch you just had, which  you just had to take a photo of. It can  be used to further enhance your business and get your customers more involved in your company than you ever thought possible.

I have never been a “social media guru” and have usually attempted to stay off of the social media “bandwagon” because I never appreciated the value that it can bring to ones image. I was very wrong with this mindset because there are so many different things that can be done with the different platforms of social media and  every business can stand out in a crowd, if used correctly.

The different types of social media that  is out there can be a bit scary to comprehend when you first jump into the online world, but they all follow a similar etiquette when it comes to promoting your brand and gaining leads. Like I have been saying in my last few blogs, it is all about content.

Your content needs to be informative but humanized. Don’t worry about always selling your brand and your product. Give the customers something fun and interesting to read. There are many different tools out there that will help track what your customers are talking about and what they found particularly interesting that your company has shared with them.

Google analytics(http://www.google.com/analytics/) is a great tool that can be very handy when it comes to tracking your blog or your Google+. It is a free analytics tool that will help provide insight into your user’s behavior, the traffic that your page receives, and the behavior on your website. This tool will help you by providing useful data that will help you get to know how you can better serve  your customers.

Pinterest, I feel, is very unacknowledged for its promotional benefits and generation of leads. All a business has to do is pin a picture and link their website to the picture. If you pin it to the right board and promote it to the right audience than you generate many leads. One thing to keep in mind, when it comes to your audience, is the gender that the site is most likely to be used by. For example,  women are five times more likely to use Pinterest than men are, while men are supposedly  more likely to use Google+. By knowing this you can customize your sites to bring in the right type of audience. Pinterest has many tools that you can use to get the fullest advantage out of your boards; Curalate (http://www.curalate.com/) helps measure your pin and board engagement. It helps find advocates and generate traffic. This is a great tool to use because it can  find out what types of pins are becoming popular and what are not.  This tool can also be used for Instagram. Currently in beta testing for Pinterest is promoted pins. These pins work like any other pin,  but have a little icon in the right hand corner. This icon is clicked on by the user and they are given more information about the pin and the company that it came from. What I feel is great about this type of promotion is that it is not pushed into the customers face and the people clicking on it genuinely want to learn more about the product and business that it came from.

This leads me into the next etiquette rule that you should always follow on any social media site: Don’t be pushy. Update continuously but know when to promote and how much to promote. If you tweet all of your information at the exact same time then you are going to flood your customers feed. They are going to eventually get bored and then ignore what you are trying to say.

There are many tools out there that will help you with the scheduling of your posts. For example, Buffer is a scheduler for LinkedIn. This tool lets you schedule your posts, while also giving you a basic click/reach analytics for all of your pages.  HootSuite ( https://hootsuite.com/) is also a great tool for scheduling your posts. This allows you to post to many different websites at the same time. You can choose to schedule your posts or have them decide when would be the prime time to post a status. Scheduling is extremely important  because you don’t want to post something on your page when no one is paying attention. A fellow blogger, Belle Cooper, and team member of Buffer wrote  a blog about the best time to tweet, post, email, and blog. http://blog.bufferapp.com/best-time-to-tweet-post-to-facebook-send-emails-publish-blogposts

In this blog she stated some interesting facts like, the engagement rate for Facebook is 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays and Twitter engagements for brands are 17% higher on weekends.  As you can see there is a bit of a trend here. More people are engaged near the end of the week, but that isn’t the case for blogs.  Mondays are the highest traffic days for an average blog. Not only should you focus on the day that you are posting but also on the time.  You want to post when there is the most users are one the site but at the same time you don’t want to be lost in the feed. Belle provides more information about the best times to post in the link I posted in the paragraph above.

One last very important rule of etiquette that you should always follow is: stay engaged. Don’t forget about the users and don’t ignore them either. If you allow for your users to comment on your pages then make sure you answer them back. I would answer back in 24 hours, if possible. You want to keep building and maintaining that relationship with the customer and make sure they know that you care about them and what they have to offer your company. If you leave a comment ignored that can result in the loss of a customer, but also make sure that when you do comment back you do it appropriately.

A bad example of responding to customer comments would be the very famous Applebee’s  incident.  Long story short a picture of a customer’s bill was posted on Reddit, making fun of the “10% tip for God” that was left instead of for the waitress. This picture went viral and Applebee’s responded by firing the waitress responsible, for violating the customer’s privacy. People were very angry and felt that Applebee’s was being hypocritical because they post positive feedback from customers on their page.  Negative opinions flooded Facebook and Twitter.  It didn’t get better from there because an Applebee’s employee decided at 2am to respond to the comments. Not only did they respond at that time but they made it a comment and not a Facebook status. They then being tagging people in their comments and ended up arguing with the customers.

Applebee’s lost a lot of customers because of this incident and hopefully the employee who did this was fired. If they had responded at an appropriate time with an appropriate message and not have fought with the customers then they may have been able to salvage their image. This just goes to show that you need to make sure you are engaging with your customers in a well-mannered way and at an appropriate time. If you would like to read more about this incident and see some of the customer responses follow this link: http://rlstollar.wordpress.com/2013/02/02/applebees-overnight-social-media-meltdown-a-photo-essay/

There are of course more social media etiquette rules that you should follow but I highlighted the ones I felt were the most important to know. I would like to give a shout out to the people at MOZ. They just put out this very lovely beginners guide to social media, which is filled with techniques and tools you can use to further enhance your social media presence and your business.

http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-social-media

Content Marketing: It’s Kind Of A Big Deal

The time for content marketing is now. Traditional marketing, ads on television, newspapers, etc…, is fading away. The internet is where everyone has turned to find information, whether it be sports, news, communication, gossip, etc… The fight of gaining a customer’s attention has become immensely harder. No longer do they have to sit through television commercials to see what they want but they can just click off a page, or skip an advertisement and goodbye to you and whatever your business was trying to sell.  So how do you attract customers long enough to get them hooked?

You put CONTENT into your marketing strategy!

Not just any content though. It needs to be relevant and valuable to your defined target audience. You want to be able to attract, acquire, and engage your audience.  This is tough with the ever-changing needs and wants of consumers. You need to be consistently producing quality content that is going to change or enhance consumer behavior. In return the customer is going to give your their loyalty and hopefully their money. 🙂

Some of you must be wondering well what does content marketing look like?

What I’m doing right now, blogging, is content marketing. I’m providing you with relevant and hopefully intriguing information twice a week. I’m marketing myself and what my thoughts and opinions are about the marketing world, with the hope that what I have to say is of interest to a few.

 You should have a blog. If you do not have one get one RIGHT NOW!

An example of a great blog is the Event Blog by Cvent: http://blog.cvent.com/

 They  were awarded gold in the 2013 Content Marketing Awards. Yes, there are awards for content marketing.  If you look at their blog you can defiantly tell why they deserved the award. The homepage alone has so much different information that there is something for everyone. Also the topics in general are fun and draw a customer’s attention. For example one of their blogs is called “I Ain’t Following you on Twitter: 3 New Twitter Follow Rules of 2014.”

Another great avenue of content marketing is video. You can make them fun and informational at the same time, which will intrigue your consumers. Federated Media Publishing took home the gold in the category of best branding video for the CMA’s for their Levi’s Curve Fit branding video. They shot five short documentaries of women bloggers. Here is one of the videos:

What Levi did here was brilliant. They had every day women give testimonials about how great their jeans are. Levi is demonstrating their expertise in jeans by showing that these jeans are for every type of women and by having most of these women be very dedicated to fashion it gives them authority in the fashion world.

Authority is one of the 7 steps in Scribes “7A” Strategy Framework to building an audience.  Scribe says that “Authority is central to a smart content marketing strategy.” You do not just get authority over night. It has to be earned and granted. Levi has defiantly earned that authority and that is why they are so successful to this day. One benefit of authority is that your content is going to be linked by other sites.   Like what I have been doing here and linking Levi’s content in this blog.  Not only are the people going to love you but so is Google. The more authoritative and important your site is the higher Google is going to place you in the rankings. Don’t think that you can fake authority though, like I said it needs to be earned and you do that with great content.

Other types of content marketing that I would suggest you look into are:

Social Media, Case Studies, Photos, E-Books, White Papers, Infographics, and Apps

Remember as  you are creating content always focus on your audience. Always focus on their needs and sales should not be your main goal. Be informative and creative. If you gain the consumers interests you are going to generate leads, increase the traffic on your site, and build a larger loyal audience. Eventually your sales will rise with hard work, but it is worth it.

 

Scribe ” A Content Marketing Strategy that Works”

http://markstaton.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/a-content-marketing-strategy-that-works.pdf

If you would like to see the other categories and winners of the CMA’s here is the link:

http://www.contentmarketingawards.com/media/misc/2013_Winners_listF.1.pdf

Search Engine Optimization For Dummies

Search engines are a vital part of our lives. We spend every day searching for answers and information to help increase our knowledge but how many of us actually know how it works? Today I am going to teach you the basics of how search engines work.

Search engines have two major functions:

1. Crawling and Indexing
2. Providing the answers

What is crawling and indexing you may ask? Well there are little automatic robots called “crawlers” or as some people call “spiders.” You input your keywords to the search engine and these little things will crawl ALL OVER the world-wide web, following links from page to page. Below is a video that shows what these “spiders” would like and do if they were real.

So once these “spiders” find the pages, the code is deciphered and stored into massive hard drives. There are data centers all over the world that hold all of the information, making it possible for users to gain answers in a fraction of a second.

Next the search engine must answer your inquiry. The articles and links that you are given are not pure randomness. The pages that are presented to you have been assigned a score, with the highest ranking ones being the first ones for the user to see. There are very complicated algorithms that are used to establish the rankings, that I will not be getting into,  but relevance and popularity play a large role.

Now you must be thinking “Well how can I use Search Engine Optimization to my advantage?”

If you combine SEO with Search Engine Marketing  (SEM) you will increase the amount of traffic and exposure to your site by leaps and bounds. SEM, as stated in Wikipedia, means:

“The process of gaining traffic by purchasing ads on search engines. It is also called paid search and sometimes referred to as CPC (cost-per-click) or PPC (pay-per-click) marketing, because most search ads are sold on a CPC / PPC basis.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_marketing

Both SEM and SEO have the same bottom line and goal: To give users information they are looking for. Though SEO is free that does not mean it is better than SEM. They should be used together because no matter you want the customer coming to your website and it shouldn’t matter how.

In my last blog I talked about how inbound marketing is all about the user and how relevant content will improve your traffic. By using SEO and SEM together you are going to gain customer attention. If your website is user-friendly and uses  keywords that are most likely to be searched, then “spiders” will be able to easily find the link to your page when searched for. Whether it is through an “organic” search or through paid links the user will still be seeing your information and coming to your site, thus  improving your traffic. By using social media tactics, like Facebook and Twitter, your links are going to become more popular and  you will become more searchable. I don’t believe you can have a successful website if you do not participate in both SEM and SEO. 

If you would like to learn more details about Search Engine Optimization please follow this link: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo.

Below is a link to my blog about inbound marketing, in case you missed it.

(https://tayfranks.wordpress.com/2014/01/08/inboundmarketing/)

#InboundMarketing

Man the team at HubSpot sure do have some great dance moves!  They also just told you all you need to know about what inbound marketing is vs. outbound marketing. Now some of you must be thinking to yourselves “what are the benefits to inbound marketing?”

Inbound marketing focuses on US! The humans!

Marketers want to give us a tailored experience that you just can’t get through television and print ads.  To inbound marketers the customer, their experience, and their feelings towards the brand are the center of the universe.   Inbound marketing has created a two-way communication street that allows for us to tell them what we want and they give it to us. No longer are we looking at the same webpage that everyone else sees but we are looking at a site that knows us and understands us.

For example HubSpot has created the Content Optimization System.

Clearly it rocks.  As stated in the YouTube Video  INBOUND 2013 Keynote  the “COS turns your website into your best sales rep.” This website is tailored to different people in the same way and it does this by actually serving relevant content.  For example the first time you go on to a COS website your going to get view A, which is the same for anyone looking the first time. Then the second time you go on the website, lets say as a lead, you are going to get view B. This view is tailored to you and what you have done in the past on the site. Next you become a customer and you are going to get view C, which is going to see you as  a valued customer and try to heighten your experience with complementary items to what you just bought. Of course these views can be different for all types of websites but this is just an example as to how a COS website would work. 

 What makes this even more amazing is the fact that it doesn’t even matter what device you are looking at. The website is going to fit on your phone, your tablet, your PC and still be just as amazing. No more awkward scrolling and sites that are not compatible to your mobile device! 

Another great benefit of inbound marketing is how cheap it is! Think about it. Inbound marketing can be used through free social media platforms like: Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Etc… By using resources, like HootSuite, your company can post to many of these social media platforms at one time. These platforms are going to draw in more traffic from all different audiences from all different places. Not only are you spending less and less money but you are gaining more and more traffic to your site. As you can see below inbound marketing continually increases the traffic to the website, some by more than 100%!

Talking about social media, HubSpot has also created a new application called Social Inbox. This is going to help advance your inbound marketing skills. Social Inbox allows for you to watch for leads. Whenever ANY of your leads are mentioned  you will be informed ASAP. Now that is fast! All you have to do is say who you want to listen to, what you want to listen for, and how you would like to be informed. Not only is this great for your company but this is great for the customer and the leads because if they have questions or concerns this website will allow for someone to help you as soon as possible.

One last resource that HubSpot has created to help greater your marketing inbound experience is Signals. Signals allows for you to be updated whenever a lead has done something that you are watching, like changing their LinkedIn or clicking on a link that you put into an email to them. This is also built-in Gmail and in Outlook.

I think that inbound marketing is the future of the marketing world but be aware it takes constant work and you must always  update relevant content that will keep the interest of your consumers.  I wouldn’t throw away outbound marketing, especially the online aspect of it.

Once again I would like to thank you for taking the time to read my blog. Please comment with any suggestions on how I can improve.

P.S. Below is a link to the INBOUND 2013 Keynote video. If you have not taken the time to get to know HubSpot, please do because they rock.

INBOUND 2013 Keynote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-InuKlf1bYc

Introductions with a little marketing analysis thrown in…

Hi, my name is Taylor Franks. I am a senior at Western Washington University. I am double concentrating in Marketing and Management Information Systems. To pay for college I work as a cashier at Albertsons and as the Assistant Business Director for the Associated Students. In my free time  I am involved in the IT Leadership program, where we spend the school year planning the annual WISC event and improving the MIS department. I am also the VP of Membership for the Student Marketing Association. I will not graduate  until Fall 2015, which gives me the opportunity to look for internships for the summer. When I grow up and join the real world I am unsure about what I want to do. I like to take opportunities as they are presented to me. . I would like to work in some sort of management position, either in Marketing or IT. I would love to work for Microsoft or Amazon. Maybe one day I will do some sort of consulting.

I am taking this Digital Marketing class mainly because of the feedback I have heard from other students. There has been raving reviews, which is hard to come by with some of the marketing classes at Western.  Also in this society having knowledge of technology and useful resources is the key to survival. This class will hopefully help me advance in my already known skills and teach me new ones. I also am very excited to obtain a Google Analytics Certificate. I heard that there is an opportunity to take the qualification exam at the end of the quarter. I have been meaning to get this certification but have lacked the  motivation.

The main thing I hope to learn and improve upon in this class is what I am attempting to do right now; blogging. I’ve never felt that I had anything to say that was interesting enough for someone to want to read. Being able to share my insights about the marketing world is going to be challenging but fun and I’m very excited.

Well I do believe I have shared enough about myself and it is time to move on to the marketing aspect of this blog post.  I was instructed to read three articles before the start of this class.

Knowledge and Skill Requirements for Marketing Jobs in the 21st Century*

This article was  written by Regina Pefanis Schlee and Katrin R. Harich.  This is  a study about the skills and knowledge required for different levels of marketing positions and how marketing courses need to better prepare their students. The study was done using Monster.com. The requirements and skills were compared for jobs starting at entry-level positions all the way to upper-level positions. Five metropolitan areas ( Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle) were used as a comparison as well. Before going into the conclusions that were generated from this study I would like to say that colleges do need to better prepare their students for the real world. As a college student myself I have had many experiences hunting for jobs that I wished I had been better prepared for. Reading textbooks and writing papers is not the adequate amount of knowledge or skill needed for the real world. A student needs to be placed in a real life situation and marketing classes, like this one, should target toward these skills.

The article mentions that advisory boards  are a crucial element of  business schools and that is defiantly what most of the departments at Western are missing. . Currently I am in the process of creating an advisory board for the MIS department. I feel that these are important because advisory boards allow for students to find mentors in their field of interest and learn the skills that may not be taught in the classroom. This article gives a fair share of data and information about skills and knowledge needed. I am only going to share a few that interest me but I have provided the link, below, in case you are interested in reading more about the findings from this study.

On Table 3 I found it interesting how little the concept of ethics matters in the business world. It is at it’s highest of 13.1% in the entry level jobs but lowers to 4.7% by the time someone advances to management.

(Rothschild)

With the dog eat dog world we live in now I wouldn’t find this interesting except for the fact that I will be paying money  to sit in a business ethics class this quarter. If ethics have little importance, when moving up the food chain,  than why am I wasting my hard-earned money to take this class? This is supportive in my earlier opinion that marketing classes need to target more towards the skills and knowledge needed in the real world. I’m not saying ethics are not important, they are especially important to me, but students shouldn’t be sitting in a quarter long class about the topic if it has little importance when finding a marketing position. This finding also says a lot about our society and the business world in general but that will have to be saved for another time.

Another finding that was presented in this article was that entry-level job’s require more technical skills than management positions. I agree with this finding and have always been told this from my professors. A book that I read recently,  Haunting The CEO, has a quote in it that says “Early in our careers, we use our technical skills the most, and our management and people skills only a little. When we move into management ranks, our use of technical skills drops while our use of people skills increases. When we move into executive ranks, as a CIO or CEO, for example, our use of technical skills is minimized and even our use of management skills drops.”Hughes, John. (Haunting the CEO. Seattle, WA: Spotless Books, 2011. eBook.)  This supports the findings in the article because the farther we move up in rank the more we deal with people and customer satisfaction. No longer are we coding or working through analytics but instead making sure the customer is satisfied and the employees are completing their work in time.

 US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2011 to 2016**

This article, written by Shar VanBoskirk,  states that by 2016 interactive marketing will be at the same level as television, at least the money spent will be equal. There were many factors stated  about why interactive marketing would increase but the most interesting reason to me was customer obsession. It is stated in the article that firms “Will invest to create customized experiences across their customers’ preferred touch points.” We as a society are becoming obsessed with having personalized items. For example we choose what apps and programs are put on our smartphones. We choose which ones we support and which ones work for us best.  A company can do all the advertisement they want but until they have an obsessed consumer base, like Apple, they will never be successful.  I like that it is all about the customer and the experience they will have with the product.

It is not surprising to read that ” A portion of marketers’ search budgets will move to mobile and social networks as users rely more on non-PC devices and nontraditional search engines like YouTube or Facebook for finding.”  This finding is supported by a study done by ComScore.  Below is a table showing the usage of different sites from 2011 to 2012.

(Mcgee)

As you can see the portal sites raise from 57%, in 2011, to 69%, in 2012. This is a 12% difference. I agree with these findings. Most days I find myself looking up websites on my phone because of the locations I am in. Though this study was done in 2012 it can only be assumed that searches on phones will keep increasing, especially since phones are becoming better computers than PCs.

One point made in this article that excites me is “Marketers will create more relevant mobile ads.”  Every time I have a chance to talk about the ads on my phone it is never in a positive light. I do believe this will increase the level of positive outlook toward interactive marketing. When I am searching something or playing a game I am more likely to click on an ad if it actually pertains to anything going on in my life. If ads were more relevant to each person than we wouldn’t feel like this:

(Joe)

There were many more forecasts in this article, but I only shared a few. If you are interested and would like to read more I have inserted the link to the article in the Bibliography section. I am now going to move on to the last but most important article.

Another Game of Thrones***

(Parkins)

Just to make this clear I have never watched Game of Thrones and so there will be no references to the show in this section. Sorry if I disappointed anyone :(.  There are four main companies that are fighting for the power over the consumer internet: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon.  This article was written in 2012 and there have been many changes to the four companies and their strategies. I have included the link to the article in case you would like to read about what happened in 2012. Here I will just be talking about the changes in each company.

Google has been very busy changing up their strategy so that people will focus on their “authority, semantic relevance, and the user experience” (Enge). This strategy change has some positives and negatives. One negative is that the ability to obtain keyword data for users who arrived at websites from a Google search has been taken away. This causes problems for the owner of websites because they are losing the understanding of how users got to their website and the thought process. This can affect the advertising that websites do because they will have a harder time knowing what attracts their consumers.

A positive for Google is the strengthening of their  platform by launching the Hummingbird Algorithm in September.  This allows for Google to understand conversational search queries instead of just putting in keywords. I love this new aspect of Google because I feel more comfortable putting in sentences when searching instead of keywords. Keywords can be tricky sometimes and cause irrelevant results. There is still some work that needs to be done with this algorithm but this has had quite a substantial impact for Google already. Another positive  is that  the Androids for Google has helped their  shares rise over the $1,000 mark. They have not struggled with the advertising switching over to mobile and this has been a great gain for them with the pay-per-click. Here is a link to a video that goes into more depth about the Google achievement. http://live.wsj.com/video/what-pushing-google-shares-to-all-time-highs/D21D8ACD-FA88-4644-8409-E0E431FA5876.html.

Apple has had a quite a year when it comes to phones. They have released the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 5C. The iOS 7 operating system has had some mixed reviews. I have an iPhone but have yet to make the jump to iOS 7 because I do not like change and I’m very stubborn. I have heard mixed reviews about the new system.  Everything has been changed. The fonts, sounds, icons, etc… have all been changed. When the system was first launched there was criticism because of the bold, bright colors but it has since been accepted and pleases their users. Siri has also been updated to be more “human”.  They have added new  data sources for Siri like Bing, notice not Google… Below is a link that will show you all the new changes with iOS 7: http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/17/ios-7-review-apple/

Facebook has not gained the most positive feedback from its users lately. If you haven’t checked your privacy settings lately you better. They have removed the privacy settings of making you unsearchable. Your friends are not the only people who can look for you and the new Graph Search can lead anyone to your profile.

Another tweak that Facebook has made is the Facebook brand pages are getting less traffic and free advertisement is becoming less available. This is “screwing over the social media marketers.” (Carlson) The number of people who are seeing these posts are declining. I can see why Facebook is making this change because it builds up revenue but they cause brands to lose customers and risk angering them.

Moving to the last company is Amazon. They seem to have little changes since 2012. They have been talking about having drones deliver packages to your house, called Amazon Prime Air. I would have to say this is taking stalking to a whole new level! I would not let a drone come to my house because who knows what else that drone could be used for.

Also let’s think about the jobs that will be taken away if packages are not needed to be delivered by UPS or FedEx. Don’t freak out yet though because these drones are not going to be ready for roughly four to  five years.

A rumor that I have read about is the Amazon phone to be created by HTC. This is likely to happen in 2014 but has yet to be reported on with much detail. I am excited to see what Amazon comes up with.

If you have made it to here I would like to say thank you for reading my first blog post. It was a bit long but I hoped you learned at least one interesting thing. May my blog posts only get more interesting and not as long in the future. 🙂

Bibliography

*http://markstaton.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/knowledge-requirements.pdf

Rothschild, Evelyn. The Thing About Ethics Is, I Have None. N.d. MEME. diylol.comWeb. 6 Jan 2014. <http://diylol.com/meme-generator/evelyn-rothschild/memes/the-thing-about-ethics-is-i-have-none&gt;.

**http://markstaton.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/forrester_interactive_marketing_forecast_2011_to_2016.pdf

Mcgee, Matt. Search On Smartphones Up 26 Percent, On Tablets Up 19 Percent In 2012 [Study]. 2013. Photograph. n.p. Web. 6 Jan 2014. <http://searchengineland.com/search-smartphones-tablets-up-2012-153328&gt;.

Joe, Bobby. Mandatory Pre-video Advertising. 2013. MEME. cheezburger.comWeb. 6 Jan 2014. <http://cheezburger.com/7983770624&gt;.

***http://markstaton.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/technology-giants-at-war-another-game-of-thrones-the-economist.pdf

Parkins, David. 2012. Photograph. The EconomistWeb. 6 Jan 2014. .

Enge, Eric. “6 Major Google Changes Reveal the Future of SEO.” Search Engine Watch. N.p., 30 Dec 2013. Web. 6 Jan 2014. <http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2301719/6-Major-Google-Changes-Reveal-the-Future-of-SEO&gt;.

Carlson, Nicholas. “Facebook Slightly Tweaked How The Site Works — And It Screwed An Entire Profession Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-screws-social-media-marketers-2013-12